Dami Im Brings New Gender-Bending Life To 'Grease' Classic 'Beauty School Dropout'

There's always a large amount of pressure on the shoulders of any stage production based on a hugely popular musical film. Follow the film word-for-word and you risk being derivative, change things up too much and you risk offending diehard fans. And the next spectacular arena show hitting Australian stages is no exception: Grease is the word.

The plethora of catchy songs and cult characters Grease offers up means that audiences will be thrilled for (and ready to scrutinise) much more than the tumultuous teen love of Danny (Drew Weston) and Sandy (Meghan O'Shea).

However in the harsh light of the modern day, many would argue this 1978 musical film about a 1950s romance could stand to see some updates. And that's exactly what we're getting as Aussie pop darling Dami Im sweeps into a gender-bending take on Teen Angel.

"As a woman, it's nice that a girl gets to speak to another girl rather than a man giving advice to a little girl about what she should do with her life."

While Im is no stranger to competition, having kicked some considerable butt as Australia's highest placing Eurovision contestant (second overall) and as the winner of The X Factor 2013, taking on a musical theatre role poses a new challenge for this eclectic performer.

"Musical theatre, it's a different genre but, as a performer, there's a lot of things that cross over and it's still, at the end of the day, performance and connecting with your audience, [which] is the same thing I do when I perform in my shows," says Im. "The difference would be that I get to create another character and I'm not really being myself as much, I can pretend to be somebody else, an angel, for that performance. It'll be different and it'll be fun because I get to let go of what I know to be myself and pretend to be this other person."

Singing one of the musical's most popular earworms, Beauty School Dropout, Teen Angel is typically portrayed by an older white man who appears from the heavenly heights (complete with a chorus line of dancing angels) to tell a teenage girl, Frenchy (being played on stage by Stacey De Waard), what to do with her life ("Wipe off that angel face and go back to high school," he croons).

The significance of changing up this character is not lost on Dami: "You know, it's 2017, people. As a woman, it's nice that a girl gets to speak to another girl rather than a man giving advice to a little girl about what she should do with her life. So it's kind of empowering in a way, empowering but also fun to change things up."

Arriving in Australia from Korea at the age of nine, Im grew up on a steady diet of Korean and Disney movies and orchestral concerts courtesy of her mother, a classically trained opera singer. She never watched Grease until adulthood, which in its own way, has helped her come to this character without any preconceived ideas about how the role has been traditionally played.

"I must be the only person in this country who hasn't grown up watching Grease!" she laughs. "As an adult I watched it and I went, 'Wow, this is really strange'. But I could see why it was such a classic."

Joining an enthusiastic cast and crew, including fellow The X Factor alumnus Barry Conrad and over 800 young Brisbanites, Dami's take on this divine role is set to win the hearts of Grease's biggest fans and critics alike.